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Windows 7: Sent to Dublin woes.

Yesterday afternoon I started up my principle W7 pc and sent some feedback for an Ebay purchase and everything was hunky-dory. At dinnertime I shut down and about one hour later I switched back on and got the Windows requires reactivating/ not genuine message with a black background. Error code ox c004f200. My W7 Ultimate retail pack was purchased around early 2010 and was fully sealed and had both DVD's with holograms on both sides. This copy of Windows has been on at least two motherboards and was last clean installed about one year ago (ssd). It has always been kept fully up to date. It took at least five attempts to activate before I managed to talk to a human being after going round in circles in Microsoft's web sites. The only help he could give me was to direct me to the howtotell site. After filling in the counterfeit software form I have had to send my genuine software to Microsoft at Dublin for evaluation. If I am lucky I may be sent a replacement. Microsoft really have you over a barrel when it comes to problems like these and I am very fortunate that I am not relying on that pc. This tale of woe is coming to readers via Windows 8 pro.

It does sound as if you were ripped off by a shady sales pitch, and an MSDN Key.

Please post the MGADiag report that Tom suggested - but also please read the following, which is almost certainly the cause of your problems.

<standard spiel>

The Key in use is an MSDN Key from a not-for-resale MSDN account.Unless you are an MSDN subscriber, you are not entitled to use the Key – and whoever sold it to you was not entitled to do so. You need to claim an immediate refund from the vendor - do NOT accept the offer of a new key (all they are trying to do is to get past the 45-day claims window or avoid you sending the evidence of their crimes to the authorities)

PSU n/a Hard Drives 750GB Seagate internal
Sundry external drives attached to other computers on the local network
1TB on the Lenovo Internet Speed as much as I can get - usually on a dongle, so <1Mb/s Antivirus MSE Browser IE11/Chrome/FF(if I must)

Thats all I have at the moment although I still convinced that the software is genuine. Possibly the software was brought into the country from the USA as although there was no country of origin on the DVD's there was something mentioned in the book. Filling in the counterfeit software form is almost impossible when you have been using the product for three years and have lost the receipt.I will keep you posted when I get a reply from Microsoft in Dublin.

I find it hard to fathom why it took Microsoft nearly three years to react to the counterfeit issue, is there a limited lifespan involved? Secondly the product and packaging was first class and easily passed the How to tell visual inspection. Why would this pruduct be in a full retail package? By the way, on the lower rear left of the cardboard outer box is x15-76036-01.

MSDN subscriptions give developers multiple licenses of each Windows product allowing them to test out their software on XP, Vista, 7 and 8 without purchasing loads of licenses individually. This system is being abused, as it has been here, and people are purchasing subscriptions and selling on the keys individually with counterfeit packaging. The key will work for a while, but when Microsoft catch up with the misuse of the MSDN subscription, the key will be blocked. It is very difficult to distinguish between a legitimate MSDN subscription and an abused one, hence it can take a while for Microsoft to react. Admittedly, I've never heard a case of a key lasting 3 years before being blocked, but there's no reason why it couldn't happen.

The counterfeiters have got very good at imitating the packaging of a Windows 7 disc now and it is hard to spot, but there are usually a few tell tales. Noel posted this link to you a few posts back, I suggest you watch it:

Well I'll see if those nice people from Microsoft Dublin take pity on me. I have just checked my other windows discs, the two W 7 hp (MAR) have good holograms and the arrows on both sides line up, two W 8 pro came direct from Microsoft and one W 8 pro from P C World so they should be ok. I also have a couple of XP pro's which seem to be ok not to mention wonderful Linux Mint so if the worst happens I will survive. I really feel sorry for those people who only have one machine.

For MSDN Keys:- MS can only act once a key hits a threshold (and they won't tell an outsider what that threshold is, understandably). They then have to put it through internal systems to ensure that all relevant parties are informed, just in case it's an oversight - then it enters the queue for the next update to the system. I have no idea how often the WAT checking system is updated, but I would suspect that it's no more than monthly because of admin and timing issues. The internal MS processes could therefore take easily a 4-5 months. It therefore depends on how close to the end of a vendors sales list you are, and how quickly he's selling them. The cannier ones will sell just enough to stay under the threshold for each product (MSDN subs include a huge number of products), until they've maximised the profits, then try and flood the market before disappearing into the sunset, laden with your cash. This could take anything up to a year or more.

For products sold using a loader:- The loader gets around online activation by fooling the computer into thinking that the OS is installed onto the correct machine, by modifying certain files. Because of a number of factors, it's impossible to stop this, so MS came up with the WAT update - which has the ability to scan the relevant files, and detect the use of a loader tool. If the user fully updates the machine, including recommended updates and optional updates, then the WAT update is installed and starts work, and within 3 days, a loader-installed machine will get a notification. However, the WAT update is a voluntary one, at least at the first update run, and can be uninstalled or refused. The other time the WAT update is installed is when you validate Windows for some reason - it is part of the validation process, rather than the activation process. This time, it does the scan immediately, and again this will show as non-genuine if a Loader is present. If a user never needs/wants to validate, then they need never install the WAT update, and may never see a non-genuine notification.

PSU n/a Hard Drives 750GB Seagate internal
Sundry external drives attached to other computers on the local network
1TB on the Lenovo Internet Speed as much as I can get - usually on a dongle, so <1Mb/s Antivirus MSE Browser IE11/Chrome/FF(if I must)

Since I believed my copy of windows to be genuine I always allowed Microsoft to load every update, which I do with every copy of Windows I use. The Windows Genuine Validation Tools have always been run. The software in question came from an Ebay vendor.he only had two copies to sell and I got the impression that they had been brought back from the states personally. I could not find out any details as Ebay only archives sales back to 2011 and I bought the software sometime in 2010, probably 2 or 3 months before SP1 was issued. The form that I had to fill out for Microsoft was not sufficiently flexible to tell them that so I had to say that I had bought from a street vendor just to fill in the required parts. Things would have been so much simpler if the software had been found to be counterfeit straight away.

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